Thursday, April 02, 2009

Twitter Poll Results: Favorite Visual Studio Add Ons

Last night I posed the question on Twitter: Aside from ReSharper, what are your favorite add ons for Visual Studio? Below are the responses – it’s a great list of tools which can really boost your productivity. Note that I asked to exclude ReSharper because I would have gotten a huge number of replies endorsing it!

CopyAsHtml: It’s undocumented, and the bits for VS 2008 are hidden away or hacky, but it’s da bomb for pasting formatted code snippets. Currently I’m using the Code Formatter for WLW for blog snippets. (See this post for great CSS additions.)

CodeRush: I don’t use its templating. What I get from it are terrific visualizations of code, plus IN YOUR FACE! metrics for cyclomatic complexity on every method in the file in front of you. Absolutely something you should have in place if you’re trying to keep your codebase in order.

Visual NDepend add-in: Again, a great tool for quickly figuring out where your codebase needs attention.

There’s empirical data that I’m a tool whore, so you can imagine my list of widgets goes on quite a bit longer than this; however, these (at the moment!) are a few of my favorites.

About Me

I'm the owner/principal of Guidepost Systems. I help lots of great folks figure out what works and what doesn't in the world of delivering quality software -- something I'm very passionate about. I'm also a Father trying to remain sane while trying to build great software, herd my kids around, fix school lunches and handle the yardwork. (And roast great coffee!)